Sunday, January 25, 2009

After months of downtime, I finally got my weather station back up to 100% functionality last night. I still need to pull a Mac mini or iMac into the house to serve up the weather data to the web along with the 3 cams I've got around the yard ; and since I'm home all this week I think I'll have time to get that installed.

My weather station is an Oregon Scientific station model WMR968. It has inside/outside temp, barometric pressure, a rain gauge, and of course, wind speed/direction. All the sensors are wireless and have little solar chargers built into them. It was one of the first things I added to the house 2 years ago when we moved in, and the flagpole on the boathouse where the anemometer is installed on is actually the aluminum mast from my old Mistral IMCO One Design rig.

I had designed the flagpole installation such that during the summer I can move it to the dock where the wind is unobstructed and get more accurate readings of actual wind conditions on the water and avoid the issues of the tree wind shadows in its normal location.

If you've thought about a weather station, there are a lot of really cool ones out there and most of them are wireless making installation a breeze. (pun intended)

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Here's a nice view from the local NWS office of the bay of Green Bay with some detail notes included on the image. (click it for the large version)

As you can see clearly on this image as I pointed out in an earlier post, the entire bay is locked in with ice. And looks like there are some big ice flows out in Lake Michigan as well. (look to the east of the "ice covered green bay" text ... that looks like a 10 mile long ice flow!)

Monday, January 19, 2009

I lifted these two images from Sharon's blog - not because its a kiter getting creamed, but 'cause I've taken a trip on those rocks, and in those conditions, I'd be all, "fuck these lines, I'm outa here!"

Sharon said he wasn't injured badly. Cool. And I agree with her, I'd love to see the footage from his GoPro. ;-)

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

From the satellite images, the entire bay of Green Bay looks to be frozen solid all the way north of the tip of Door County to Michigan. I'm not sure about areas north of my house, but the bay is amazingly flat and in some sections, suitable for ice boating. While the ice maps aren't showing the ice cover for some weird reason, you can see it clearly on the visible satellite image here.

We've got winds this week, and despite the cold temps putting the wind chills south of -20 and possibly to -40 on Thursday, a few of us are ice kiting and making the most of all this ice.

That said, if I was part of the crew headed to the Baja this weekend, I'd be cool with sitting inside and staying warm.

How big of a swell? 25 foot +. Its been 3 years since I've had that and the last time was easily my best two days ever with 24-28 foot on the reef at lowers. (though the outside break at uppers is where I nailed my biggest wave ever on that trip that still makes me sweat when I think about it...)

Thursday, January 1, 2009

It happens every year. Some idiot ice fisherman ends up drifting off on an ice flow and has to be rescued. Right now, as I write this, two ice shanty's are adrift on a massive ice flow that fractured off within 15-25 minutes of the Arthur Anderson transiting the channel mid-bay. The fissure opened up and the entire ice flow which I estimate to be several square miles big, is drifting in the southerly winds to the north. (south winds are 20-25 knots currently)

I'd estimate that the water gap is a good 50 hards wide at this point, and while I cannot tell if the two shanty's are occupied, a call to 911 was placed regardless to be on the safe side. I'm interested to see if they dispatch Eagle III or the hovercraft to investigate.

9:31 AM CST Update - Drift is now 200 yards north of the initial location.

9:35 AM CST Update - Drift is has increased rapidly and they are now an est. 350 yards north of their initial position.